Systems and methods disclosed herein relate generally to augmenting existing standard-formatted images. Standard image formats such as PNG, JPEG, and others are widely used, but there is no standard way, or sometimes no way, to attach information to those kinds of files, and therefore no standard way to process any attached information, if any. These formats have some ability to store image metadata, but existing methods for storing metadata suffer several problems. First, they are format-specific, for example, a method for attaching metadata to a JPEG file is different from a method for attaching metadata to a PNG file. Second, existing methods do not specifically allow for addition of geospatial metadata. Third, existing methods embed metadata within the structure of the image in varying positions based on image format. For example, the GeoTIFF format adds rich geospatial tags to standard TIFF images. However, TIFF images are not as widely used as JPEGs and PNGs. Also, GeoTIFF tags do not support the full expressiveness offered by an extensible mark-up language, for example, but not limited to, XML.
What is needed is a system in which images could be encoded within images, images could be signed digitally, change history could be encoded, and image labels and other annotations could be encoded along with the image. These capabilities exist for PDF documents, but not for other formats and not in a way that can be processed in a standard way.